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"Nothing, on the other hand, can be more impenetrable to the uninitiated than a legislation founded upon precedents."
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"Litigant: a person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bone."
"The laws of men are not infallible."
"When they say whatever you say may be used against you, they mean it!"
"Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy."
"The law. Lady Frances, is an uncertain animal. It has twists and turns that surprise the non-legal mind."
"When you kill a man, You steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, Rob his children of a father."
"What's law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law -- our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don't look too closely at the law. Do, and you'll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You'll find the serenity, which is just another word for death."
"This extraordinary tale of madness, leading up to Stephen being sectioned off to the lunatic asylum at Broadmoor, also reveals Stephen's eventual fight to win his freedom from the asylum, which saw his legal team mount a successful challenge against the 'criminally insane' label that was keeping him in Broadmoor. Moyle's legal team successfully argued that he was either a criminal or insane, he could not be both."
"The Supreme Court of the United States is no longer a court of law. It is a forum of legal fad and fashion."
Explore more quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville
"I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all."
"During my stay in the United States, I witnessed the spontaneous formation of committees in a country for the pursuit and prosecution of a man who had committed a great crime. In Europe, a criminal is an unhappy man who is struggling for his life against the agents of power, whilst the people are merely a spectator of the conflict: in America, he is looked upon as an enemy of the human race, and the whole of mankind is against him."
"When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy, they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters."
"Amongst democratic nations men easily attain a certain equality of conditions: they can never attain the equality they desire. It perpetually retires from before them, yet without hiding itself from their sight, and in retiring draws them on. At every moment they think they are about to grasp it; it escapes at every moment from their hold. They are near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights they die."
"The only nations which deny the utility of provincial liberties are those which have fewest of them; in other words, those who are unacquainted with the institution are the only persons who passed censure upon it."
"It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity."
"Under the absolute sway of an individual despot the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul, and the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose superior to the attempt; but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved."
"I passionately love liberty, legality, respect for rights, but not democracy. That is what I find in the depth of my soul."
"Another tendency, which is extremely natural to democratic nations and extremely dangerous, is that which leads them to despise and undervalue the rights of private persons. The attachment which men feel to a right, and the respect which they display for it, is generally proportioned to its importance, or to the length of time during which they have enjoyed it. The rights of private persons amongst democratic nations are commonly of small importance, of recent growth, and extremely precarious; the consequence is that they are often sacrificed without regret, and almost always violated without remorse."
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